Hail and Farewell

During the summer of 1984, on a trip to America, Haruki Murakami and his wife, Yoko, paid a visit to Sky House in Washington State, the home of Raymond Carver and his wife, Tess Gallagher. Murakami had translated Carver's work into Japanese, but this was their first meeting. Sitting 'out on the deck of the hilltop house', the couples ate smoked salmon and crackers and 'lamented the death of small birds that had been crashing into a glass windbreak'.1 Although the conversation was a little stilted, owing to the Murakamis' frail grasp of spoken English, everyone seemed to feel that something special happened that day. Carver later wrote a poem about it, dedicated to Murakami, the opening lines of which capture the peculiar essence of the occasion:

We sipped tea. Politely musing

on possible reasons for the success

of my books in your country. Slipped

into talk of pain and humiliation

you find occurring, and reoccurring,

in my stories. And that element

of sheer chance.2

This scene - filled with unspoken feeling; drawing out a hidden line of influence between two very different writers - could be one of the episodes in Rachel Cohen's first book A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of Writers and Artists, 1854-1967 (2004) which relates encounters between a host of well-known, and lesser-known figures. Not all of the meetings are as peaceful as the one between Carver and Murakami. Some are more fruitful; some much less so. Beginning with Henry James and Mathew Brady, then passing on down the years to John Cage and Marcel Duchamp, Cohen presents a sequence of some 36 distinct chapters, each of which explores different pairings and trios. An ode to friendship and creative influence, the book is also an ingeniously intersecting biographical jigsaw puzzle.

The portraits move through several different locations and eras - Boston, Paris and, most frequently, New York - but what gives these concise pieces of 'imaginative nonfiction' their coherence and momentum is that so many of the social and artistic circles they describe overlap. The characters come and go as if in a series of linked short stories; even when they're gone, their presence very often continues to be felt. The notion of literature that slowly comes into focus is of an endless, ongoing conversation, a constant exchange of ideas in talk and letters and books. You sense it most clearly with the writers - and writers here do outnumber the artists by some way - who had a direct influence on each other, as friends.

Long after first meeting Marianne Moore, by appointment, in New York's public library, Elizabeth Bishop wrote of her fellow poet that it seemed almost as if 'Marianne talked to me steadily for the next thirty-five years, but of course that is nonsensical'. The friendship between Henry James and William Dean Howells (or indeed, between Howells and Mark Twain) was similarly long-lasting, forming a subliminal dialogue that runs beneath all their work. In the case of James and Howells, characters sometimes even seem to walk between the pages of their novels, most clearly in the form of the 'American girl' Howells depicted in his novel A Chance Acquaintance (1873), who went on to become such a central, evolving figure in James' fiction.

In his book-length discussion with Michael Ondaatje The Conversations (2002), the film editor Walter Murch talks of collaboration adding a 'different perspective [...] some chisel mark slightly at an angle to the central vision. And each of these moments, these facets, has the potential to make the work "sparkle".' Compared to the single focus of most conventional biography, Cohen's sideways approach has a similar effect on her subjects, as they write to - and about - each other. Carl van Vechten, for instance, reveals that Gertrude Stein's 'voice is a warm caress and it would not be necessary to understand what [she] was saying [...] to appreciate the beauty of this voice'. Norman Mailer, later on, describes Robert Lowell's 'fine stammering voice which gave the impression that life rushed at him in a series of hurdles and some he succeeded in jumping and some he did not'.

Inevitably there are less mutually sympathetic encounters. In perhaps the most dramatic meeting - more of a collision - Hart Crane drunkenly invites himself to stay with the writer Katherine Anne Porter in Mexico, with vague plans of penning an epic poem, or a play, about the Aztecs. Porter wrote furiously about how he would stride around her house and 'weep and shout, shaking his fist. "I am Baudelaire, I am Whitman, I am Christopher Marlowe, I am Christ".' Cohen never takes sides, but you get the feeling she doesn't really like Porter. An earlier chapter about her, one of several episodes dealing with meetings that never happened and paths not taken, berates her for an inaccurate essay about Willa Cather, a writer Porter regretted not knowing.

Another spat was between Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, who attempted to write a play together in the spring of 1930, with Hurston providing most of the subject matter and Hughes working on structure and style. They soon fell out over it, quite seriously. Eight years later Hurston 'still woke up in the night, crying'. While many of the non-literary collaborations have a genuine dynamism - such as the impromptu merging of music, dance and art between John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg - it's a significant fact that among the writers in the book there are almost no actively collaborative works. One of the few with any kind of constructive push and pull pairs a writer and a photographer: James Baldwin and Richard Avedon's Nothing Personal (1964).

Avedon's photographs, with those of the portrait photographers Mathew Brady, Edward Steichen and van Vechten, are reproduced in the book, as well as being woven directly into the main flow of the narrative. Some of the best chapters describe photographic sessions in great detail, and Cohen's technique leans towards trying to catch the same kinds of things that portrait photographers do: the telling line in a face, the right light and background and moment, the tiny detail that brings home the truest nature of a personality. Henry James, she writes early on, 'recognized in photography an interest akin to his own, a capturing of people and scenes that kept them in "the palpable present intimate"'. Cohen shares this as well. As people said of Brady's daguerreotypes, you feel 'properly introduced'.